While playing in a gravel pit, five siblings--Robert, Anthea, Cyril, Jane and baby Lamb--unearth Psammead, a sand-fairy who has the ability to grant wishes. Unfortunately, the Psammead has been buried so long that his magic has grown rusty, and the children's wishes go humorously awry. When the children wish to be beautiful, their servants think them strangers and throw them out onto the street. When they wish for jewelry for their mother, all the jewelry in Kent appears in their house. The children must ask the Psammead to grant one final wish to set things straight, but in doing so, they...

There were three of them-Jerry, Jimmy, and Kathleen. Of course, Jerry's name was Gerald, and not Jeremiah, whatever you may think; and Jimmy's name was James; and Kathleen was never called by her name at all, but Cathy, or Catty, or Puss Cat, when her brothers were pleased with her, and Scratch Cat when they were not pleased. And they were at school in a little town in the West of England-the boys at one school, of course, and the girl at another, because the sensible habit of having boys and girls at the same school is not yet as common as I hope it will be some day.

There were once four children who spent their summer holidays in a white house, happily situated between a sandpit and a chalkpit. One day they had the good fortune to find in the sandpit a strange creature. Its eyes were on long horns like snail's eyes, and it could move them in and out like telescopes. It had ears like a bat's ears, and its tubby body was shaped like a spider's and covered with thick soft fur-and it had hands and feet like a monkey's.

The house was three miles from the station, but, before the dusty hired hack had rattled along for five minutes, the children began to put their heads out of the carriage window and say, "Aren't we nearly there?" And every time they passed a house, which was not very often, they all said, "Oh, is this it?" But it never was, till they reached the very top of the hill, just past the chalk-quarry and before you come to the gravel-pit. And then there was a white house with a green garden and an orchard beyond, and mother said, "Here we are "

In The Book of Dragons by E. Nesbit. A Dragon who flies out of a magical book. He happened to be building a Palace when the news came, and he left all the bricks kicking about the floor for Nurse to clear up-but then the news was rather remarkable news. You see, there was a knock at the front door and voices talking downstairs, and Lionel thought it was the man come to see about the gas, which had not been allowed to be lighted since the day when Lionel made a swing by tying his skipping rope to the gas bracket.

SHE was going to meet her lover. And the fact that she was to meet him at Cannon Street Station would almost, she feared, make the meeting itself banal, sordid. She would have liked to meet him in some green, cool orchard, where daffodils swung in the long grass, and primroses stood on frail stiff little pink stalks in the wet, scented moss of the hedgerow. The time should have been May. She herself should have been a poem-a lyric in a white gown and green scarf, coming to him through the long grass under the blossomed boughs.

It began with the day when it was almost the Fifth of November, and a doubt arose in some breast-Robert's, I fancy-as to the quality of the fireworks laid in for the Guy Fawkes celebration. 'They were jolly cheap, ' said whoever it was, and I think it was Robert, 'and suppose they didn't go off on the night? Those Prosser kids would have something to snigger about then.'

To be rich is a luxurious sensation-the more so when you have plumbed the depths of hard-up-ness as a Fleet Street hack, a picker-up of unconsidered pars, a reporter, an unappreciated journalist-all callings utterly inconsistent with one's family feeling and one's direct descent from the Dukes of Picardy.

This is the story of the different ways we looked for treasure, and I think when you have read it you will see that we were not lazy about the looking. There are some things I must tell before I begin to tell about the treasure-seeking, because I have read books myself, and I know how beastly it is when a story begins, "'Alas " said Hildegarde with a deep sigh, "we must look our last on this ancestral home"'-and then some one else says something-and you don't know for pages and pages where the home is, or who Hildegarde is, or anything about it. Our ancestral home is in the Lewisham Road. It...

Two complementing novels of fantastic adventure for young readers in one volume
There can be little doubt that contemporary authors of children's fiction whose stories place ordinary children in tales of high adventure, in fantastical lands populated by exotic and mythical characters and creatures, owe an abiding debt to Edith Nesbit. It is widely accepted that she originated this form of fiction for the young, and has left us not only her own classics such as 'Five Children and It' and 'The Phoenix and the Carpet, ' but also potentially offered inspiration for perennial favourites by...